The Ten Coolest Eastern-European Books You've Never Heard Of
The Ten Coolest Eastern-European Books You've Never Heard Of
By Jeffrey Zuckerman
May 13, 2013

Black Balloon has just published Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, translated by Will Firth. Despite its title, the novel takes place almost entirely in Croatia and feels so deeply Eastern European in sensibility that I found myself jotting down other books from that region once eclipsed by the Iron Curtain’s shadow. Without further ado, here are ten brilliant and barely-known books from ten countries in Eastern Europe...

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Chechnya, Then and Now: A Reader’s Guide
Chechnya, Then and Now: A Reader’s Guide
By Jeffrey Zuckerman
May 06, 2013

Three weeks ago, Chechnya was just a name on a map. As reports came in that the main suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were of Chechen extraction, I looked at the books I'd read about Chechnya. What was it like to live, I wondered, in this region that everybody had heard of but nobody knew about? 

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